If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Comment

Pretty sure there's something wrong with Michael's benchmarks, at least for the Unigine and Doom 3 tests. These are x86, and it very much looks like he didn't correctly compile/install the updated Mesa x86 libraries - results are identical. Yet again I have to wonder why Michael didn't investigate this at all.

Comment

Pretty sure there's something wrong with Michael's benchmarks, at least for the Unigine and Doom 3 tests. These are x86, and it very much looks like he didn't correctly compile/install the updated Mesa x86 libraries - results are identical. Yet again I have to wonder why Michael didn't investigate this at all.

I think there will be no improvements with r600-sb for Doom 3 anyway, it uses simple shaders where it's hard to find something to optimize, it's like trying to optimize "Hello world" program.

AFAIK catalyst uses optimizations related to texture formats ("Catalyst AI" or something like this, I didn't look into what exactly it does though), and this option doubled Doom3 performance with fglrx for me last time when I tested, r600g may need the same optimizations.

Comment

Hmm, I'm not very familiar with Doom 3, but I was under the impression it used somewhat complex pixel shaders at least. AFAIK it was one of the first games to really push shader hardware, with high quality per-pixel lighting and shadows.

Can you tell more about the optimizations Catalyst uses? Does it convert to a more favorable texture format under the hood or something like that?

Comment

Hmm, I'm not very familiar with Doom 3, but I was under the impression it used somewhat complex pixel shaders at least. AFAIK it was one of the first games to really push shader hardware, with high quality per-pixel lighting and shadows.

Possibly Doom3 shaders were somewhat complex for hardware available in 2004, IIRC it was a time of Radeon X800 series (R4xx chips), but for newer hardware they are pretty trivial as compared e.g. to shaders used by Unigine demos. They are not even written in GLSL, it's ARB programs.

Can you tell more about the optimizations Catalyst uses? Does it convert to a more favorable texture format under the hood or something like that?

As I said I didn't look into it, but so far I think it does something like that.
Also there were some shader tweaks that were probably included as app-specific optimizations in the proprietary drivers, e.g. to use gpu math instead of texture lookup to get precomputed values: http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=12732

And now we have Doom3 sources, so it might be easier and more efficient to optimize the game itself for modern hardware than to optimize the drivers for this game.

Comment

First time since one year I've switched back to the FOSS drivers on my HD 5600 Mobility laptop, I enabled the shader backend optimizations with a script in .kde/env:

Code:

$ env|grep R600
R600_DEBUG=sb

and WOW! Don't Starve works better than with fglrx (no cloud glitch and perfectly smooth*), Portal works perfectly, and Stacking works BETTER than it used to on Windows when I played it one year ago, all of them are playable in highest settings with FXAA or MSAA with a good framerate.

So amazing job guys! What's missing now is proper power management, but I can live with switching between low and high profiles for a while.

*: Actually Don't Starve is smoother than with fglrx during the first 3/4-1 hour but then like it happened with fglrx it becomes choppy (usually when my character loses his sanity), and the slowdown/choppiness is much more sensible than with fglrx. A game restart fixes it. BTW it's not a 2D game, it's 3D with a not so low polygon count (it's not just simple sprites) and shader-based effects.
But overall it feels so much better because it doesn't have those "micro-freezes" fglrx has at all times, it's really perfectly smooth.

Comment

First time since one year I've switched back to the FOSS drivers on my HD 5600 Mobility laptop, I enabled the shader backend optimizations with a script in .kde/env:

Code:

$ env|grep R600
R600_DEBUG=sb

and WOW!

....

So amazing job guys! What's missing now is proper power management, but I can live with switching between low and high profiles for a while.

*: Actually Don't Starve is smoother than with fglrx during the first 3/4-1 hour but then like it happened with fglrx it becomes choppy (usually when my character loses his sanity), and the slowdown/choppiness is much more sensible than with fglrx. A game restart fixes it. BTW it's not a 2D game, it's 3D with a not so low polygon count (it's not just simple sprites) and shader-based effects.
But overall it feels so much better because it doesn't have those "micro-freezes" fglrx has at all times, it's really perfectly smooth.

Paypal: vadimgirlin at gmail dot com
I will be donating a bit later this month, the guy clearly needs better GPU card xD.

The choppy issue you are having can probably be related to memory fragmentation - but within 3D game, its usually handled by game engine logic alone. Maybe Linux version is simply bugged..? Some tests on geforce might help confirm that.

As far as I can see it's a typical z-fighting issue, I can reproduce it with linux demo and I think it's not a bug in r600g, ideally the game developers should take care of that. By the way, it doesn't happen for me with windows version of the demo (and wine).

Comment

Paypal: vadimgirlin at gmail dot com
I will be donating a bit later this month, the guy clearly needs better GPU card xD.

Could you point me out where Vadim mentioned his current config?

Clubbing together so that he could offer himself a good graphics card is the least we could do for his awesome work!

And out of curiosity could you or Vadim point me out to mails or blog posts that explain a bit how you managed to get such a leap in performance with shaders?

Anyway I wanted to see the drivers would stand the test of fire, doing some stuff I'd never consider doing with fglrx , i.e Steam Windows games run by Wine. Never done that before, but the Windows version of Steam actually works great with Wine. For the games themselves that's another matter

Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath was ported on PC with OpenGL, so it could potentially run perfectly on Linux, and it basically works:

..but at 2 FPS. Is it falling back to software Mesa because of unsupported extensions?

Second game was Endless Space, a great 4X based on Unity 3, so it can be run in OpenGL mode with the -force-opengl falg on Windows but Unity 3 seems to do something with OpenGL contexts that is tolerated by WGL but not by GLX, so I couldn't get it to run at all. It launches in the default D3D9 mode but all I get is a black background with weirdly colored stuff in place of nebulae. Other people managed to get it working in D3D9: